ethecon honours the Sudan activist Tomo Križnar and shames the manager and major shareholders of DOW CHEMICAL / Public ceremony of awarding the ethecon awards and presentation „Stop FRONTEX!“

On occasion of the International Day of Peace on September 21st, 2015, ethecon – Foundation Ethics & Economy announces the recipients’ names of the two familiar ethecon awards 2014/2015.

The International ethecon Blue Planet Award honours the efforts of Slovenian activist for human rights and peace Tomo Križnar, the International ethecon Black Planet Award denounces the chairman of the board Andrew Liveris and board member James Ringler and the major shareholders of the chemicals group DOW CHEMICAL (USA).

Over many years Tomo Križnar has been working in Sudan at the risk of jeopardising his own life between the fronts of the raging war, and he stands up for sustainable peace. The board members and major shareholders of DOW CHEMICAL are, among others, responsible for 30 years continuing of the impacts of the greatest chemical disaster in the history of industries in Bhopal/India.

Mia Farrow said about Tomo Križnar: „‘There is no one remotely like Tomo Kriznar. Over decades, with singular courage and conviction he has journeyed through the most remote and perilous parts of Darfur and Southern Sudan documenting atrocities, taking photographs and compiling information that is as invaluable as his humanitarian endeavours.’ “

It is more different when looking at the board members Andrew Liveris and James Ringler as well as the major shareholders of the chemicals group DOW CHEMICAL (USA). The justification Black Planet Award 2014/2015 they say: „No matter, if party contributions during election campaigns, tax evasion, environmental destruction, from support of genetic engineering to radioactive contamination, manipulated measurements, war mongering, price manipulation, corruption – DOW CHEMICAL is involved in countless crimes against humans and environment. The company’s president and chairman of the board and supervisory board Andrew Liveris, the member of the board and audit committee James M. Ringler as well as the group’s major shareholders are the ones that need to be held responsible for the decisions and actions at DOW CHEMICAL (USA). They own the group. They run the company. They are acting to increase their personal power and private wealth. To this end, they ride roughshod over morality and ethics and hazard our planet being turned into a Black Planet.“ (Justification International ethecon Black Planet Award 2014/15 from 21/09/2015)

The International ethecon Awards will take place during a public ceremony. The honorific speech for Tomo Križnar will be delivered by Alfred Buss, Amnesty International, coordinator Sudan/Southern Sudan, the shaming speech for the board members and major shareholders of DOW CHEMICAL will be delivered by Indian doctor Dr Mali Muttanna Mallappa of Sambhavna Trust Clinic/ Bhopal.

The ceremony will be framed into the ethecon congress about the latest topic „Stop FRONTEX – fight refugee causes and not refugees!”. The presentation will be done by a famous representative of ProAsyl.

The ethecon congress including the ceremony of the ethecon Awards will take place:

Saturday, 21/11/2015
“Pfefferwerk” on Pfefferberg
(Schönhauser Allee 176)
Starting at 14.00 pm (entrance at 13 pm)
Attendance at the congress is free, but notifiable
info@ethecon.org
Further information
at www.ethecon.org .

Unlike many foundations funded by a certain company, family, church, political party or state, ethecon is one of the few “bottom-up” foundations, currently supported by 39 donors and committed to future generations by campaigning “for a world free from exploitation and repression!” Our young foundation depends on donations and support through members.

Only if we develop and implement environmentally friendly and humane economic and societal models can we ward off the threat of ecological and social disasters. ethecon – Foundation Ethics & Economy takes the long, inter-generational view and campaigns with vision and perspective.

“The record settlement of $18.7 billion that the oil company BP has arrived at in the Deepwater Horizon environmental disaster case in the United States has naturally revived the debate on the denial of justice to the victims of a far bigger catastrophe — the Bhopal gas leak. As industrial accidents go, the blowout in BP’s well in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was staggering, killing 11 people and spectacularly devastating an already stressed marine ecosystem with millions of barrels of oil. Five State governments and the federal government of the U.S. have been vigorously pursuing penalties and compensation claims with the company, resulting in the settlement. Yet, the impact of the oil spill pales in comparison with the magnitude of what happened at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal in 1984.

“They want me to be bankrupt, they want my wife to leave me, they want me to jump off a building,” says Steven Donziger, a lawyer based in New York City whose team won an unprecedented judgment against Chevron in 2011. That year, an Ecuadorean court found Texaco guilty of having polluted close to 2,000 square miles of the Amazon basin with crude oil, toxic wastewater, and other contaminants. The country’s Supreme Court eventually ordered the company’s successor, Chevron, to pay $9.5 billion for environmental remediation, medical treatment, and other relief for those affected. But Donziger’s victory painted a bull’s-eye on his back. The lawyer says he’s been watched; that he’s had laptops, thousands of documents, bank statements, and tax returns seized by court order and handed to Chevron’s lawyers; and that friends and supporters have been turned against him by threats of ruinous lawsuits.

Worst of all, this March a New York federal judge convicted Donziger under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act of heading a criminal undertaking that had corrupted and intimidated Ecuadorean judges in order to shake down Chevron. (If the $9.5 billion awarded to his clients were ever collected, Donziger, who has worked on the case for most of the two decades it took to reach completion, would stand to earn millions in lawyer’s fees.) Donziger has appealed. Even if he is vindicated, however, this novel deployment of the RICO Act—normally applied to mobsters and drug syndicates—adds a particularly nasty weapon to the already formidable arsenal that U.S. multinationals have developed, with considerable help from American judges, to defeat demands for accountability by litigants in poor foreign countries.

Association for India’s Development (AID) has always stood by the struggles of the oppressed and marginalized. We have a large volunteer base in the United States and today, on Human Rights Day, we are shocked by the choke that led to the death of Eric Garner in New York and the numerous other cases of extrajudicial killings to which recent similar incidents have drawn attention. Nobody has yet been brought to justice in this case in the United States, and nobody has been brought to justice in India when on December 3, 1984, the Union Carbide plant (now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dow Chemical Corp.) choked, maimed, and killed thousands of people in Bhopal. Human rights groups across the United States and India are on the streets fighting for justice, and on this day we stand for equality in the eyes of the law for all races, all people of color, and holding governments and corporations accountable for their actions around the world.

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#Bhopal34 | Dow Chemical’s shameless hypocrisy on social media

Dow Chemical has a lot of blood on its hands for the Bhopal Gas Disaster 34 years ago. Currently they are shamelessly promoting themselves as an environment conscious, sustainability-promoting organization. Which is unbelievably hypocritical if you look at how they have washed their hands off of the on-going disaster in Bhopal.

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